Imagine clean wireless energy available for anyone in the world to tap into; zero-emission cars and planes, self-charging electronics, and wireless appliances all harnessing energy with a radio antenna. It may sound like science fiction, but it’s actually based on century-old discoveries by Nikola Tesla.

It was his plan for the Wardenclyffe Tower until it was squashed by industrialists because they could not control and meter it. The tower was to be a magnifier and transmitter of radio waves through the atmosphere that electronic devices could freely draw from. While many micro-uses of this type of energy are beginning to emerge, a large scale application is still absent.

Two Russian scientists hope to change that by building Tesla’s “Wireless Energy Transmitter” tower.

Leonid Plekhanov and Sergey Plekhanov, both graduates of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, believe that by combining Tesla’s plans with modern materials and other recent discoveries, they will succeed in delivering free, clean energy to the entire planet.

“Modern materials and equipment provide us with an incredible opportunity to re-implement the invention of Tesla and build a solution of the energy transmission problem Today! We’ve re-designed a version of Tesla’s Wardenclyffe tower based on his principles but using the modern materials and advanced electronic components and are ready to build it,” they write on their crowdfunding page.

The towers basically work to magnify electrical energy and transmit it via radio waves across the globe using the “Earth-Ionosphere waveguide like a sort of analogue of simple wire.”

Nikola Tesla imagined this clean technology would power homes and fuel electric vehicles, including planes. But today the uses seem endless. Michael Jaeger astutely explained the potential of wireless energy in a 2012 article:

Power transmitters fed from generating plants could send megawatts of power at millions of volts at gigahertz frequencies into the atmosphere as radio waves, and portable devices like cell phones could grab it from the air, no batteries needed. All cars could be electric with zero emissions, and depending on the number of transmitters and the power output of these transmitters, one could theoretically drive across the country without requiring large batteries. Homes would have antennae to connect them to the power grid rather than wires. Power losses would be minimal unlike today. Our power grids routinely see 8 percent power losses. There would be no transmission line congestion, which creates large spikes in locational pricing in wholesale electricity markets due to transmission line limitations. Infrastructure costs to safely transmit power would be eliminated.

Sounds like a pretty awesome future. Support this project at IndieGoGo.